July 23, 2006

Fossil fools

The
main characters in this miniature drama-documentary are Americans. The
unspoken message, unsubtly applied, appears to be that it’s the Yanks
who are to blame. An overweight and badly-dressed couple, housewife
Janie and her truck-driver husband, John, are shown trying to adapt as
prices escalate from $85 to $160 dollars a barrel, and a society based
on cheap oil comes under stress. First there are queues at petrol
stations and then outright shortages. Food prices rise. John loses his
job. With the SUV unaffordable, the couple eventually have to resort to
wheeling their groceries home in a shopping trolley.

John is
prone to all sorts of anti-social individualism. Besides driving a big,
fuel-hungry 4x4, he is shown stealing from his employers, hoarding
diesel, unwilling to offer lifts to neighbours and driving like a
maniac. Eventually, he gets his comeuppance, being left bloodied and
bruised after getting into a fist fight on a garage forecourt – an
allegory for the Iraq war?

Their daughter, the pushy Jess, works
as an oil company executive and lives in London, with her English
husband Nick, who, presumably like Prime Minister Tony Blair, is
bulldozed into submission by his American partner. Drilling in the
Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, she despoils the Alaskan wilderness
on behalf of her multinational employer. However, her search for “the
world’s last giant oilfield” ultimately proves to be fruitless. The
program also shows Venezuela’s governing left-wing and rabidly anti-US
strongman Hugo Chavez still in power in 2016 – the one prediction in
the program with which I feel comfortable.